Michael Carrithers
Biographic Data
| ID | 136580 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Michael Carrithers |
| GIVEN NAMES | Michael |
| FAMILY NAME | Carrithers |
| SIGNATURE | CARRITHERS M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Durham University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 44 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 870 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 42 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1979 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2022 |
| H-INDEX | 13 |
Culture, Rhetoric and the Vicissitudes of Life
Inspired by the Rhetoric Culture Project, this volume focuses on the use of imagery, narrative, and cultural schemes to deal with predicaments that arise during the course of life. The contributors explore how people muster their resources to understand and deal with emergencies such as illness, displacement, or genocide. In dealing with such circumstances, people can develop new rhetorical forms and, in the process, establish new cultural resour…
From lived experience to political representation: Rhetoric and landscape in the North York Moors
Approaches to landscape are characterized by an unresolved distinction between political representation on the one hand and phenomenology on the other. In this paper we address this distinction by demonstrating how those living in close quarters with landscape (farmers) translate their lived experience into political representation. Through the use of rhetoric culture theory we show how farmers use narrative and symbolism to stake their political…
Brexit Referendum: First reactions from anthropology
Brexit Referendum: first reactions from anthropologyMy immediate reaction to the results of the British Referendum on leaving or remaining in the EU was to remember Alexei Yurchak's book, Everything was forever, until it was no more (Yurchak 2006).In the book, Yurchak describes the feeling of many people in Russia when the Soviet Union broke up: it came as a complete shock because they thought it would never happen; but once it had happened, it w…
Perspectives on the intersection of biology and society
Anthropology as irony and philosophy, or the knots in simple ethnographic projects
In this essay on the idea of "anthropological knots" I lay out three closely related ideas. One is that the practice of ethnography may be regarded as being also the practice of philosophy, insofar as philosophy is the pursuit of knowledge about ourselves. The second is that this pursuit of ethnography/philosophy is in its nature ironical, which means roughly that it is woven, or knotted, in the encounter of differing viewpoints, just as Socrates…
Seriousness, Irony, and the Mission of Hyperbole
Seriousness is achieved when a speaker effectively moves the audience according to his or her intentions. But seriousness is fragile and subject to countless vicissitudes, as illustrated in an encounter with the television evangelist Oral Roberts. I interrogate one of the means used to counter such vicissitudes-hyperbole. Hyperbole may include exaggeration and amplification of all kinds, and may be manifest in deeds as well as words. I first foll…
Assembly of Listeners: Jains in Society
Can a Species Be a Person: A Trope and Its Entanglements in the Anthropocene Era
The notion that an animal species is comparable with a human person is unusual but significant in North Atlantic societies. We analyze this trope to make a case for rhetoric culture theory as a powerful form of anthropological analysis. The "species is person" trope has been woven with other tropes to make moral and cosmological arguments in the present geosocial era of environmental crisis. The trope stands against two others in North Atlantic s…
A social form and its craft-y use
The paper considers the trope of ‘persons-in-parivaara’, persons in a retinue, as a rhetorical and social form in South Asia, using Digambar Jain examples, mostly from Maharashtra. As a social form, persons-in-parivaara evokes familiar themes, especially hierarchy in relationships, the vote bank, and Mattison Mines' notion of the ‘big man’. The paper shows how the persons-in-parivaara trope is used in a wide variety of media and genres, including…
Ontology Is Just Another Word for Culture: Motion Tabled at the 2008 Meeting of the Group for Debates in Anthropological Theory, University of Manchester
Excursions by Michael Jackson
From Inchoate Pronouns to Proper Nouns: A Theory Fragment with 9/11, Gertrude Stein, and an East German Ethnography
Despite the elaborate means human beings deploy to render the world predictable and transparent, we nevertheless continually confront situations which are uncertain and opaque. This is especially so in the modern world, in which supralocal institutions and information mediated from afar allow the actions of strangers beyond our face-to-face knowledge to affect us closely. One of the chief means we use to gain purchase in such situations is to doc…
Why Anthropologists Should Study Rhetoric
Anthropology as a Moral Science of Possibilities
In a world of continued and expanding empire, does sociocultural anthropology in itself offer grounds for moral and social criticism? One line in anthropological thought leads to cultural relativism and an awareness that a cloud of alternative possibilites surrounds any moral code. However, a second line, based in reflection on fieldwork and on the professional ethics arising with it, does suggest some basic moral aesthetic standards, including t…
On Polytropy: Or the Natural Condition of Spiritual Cosmopolitanism in India: The Digambar Jain Case
As Jog Maya remarked to me, there are religions enough for everyone to choose, just like vegetables in the morning bazaar. Gellner 1992:70 The family was in continuous communion with a whole range of business associates, gods and men. Bayly 1983:390
The Feast of the Sorcerer: Practices of Consciousness and Power
The Feast of the Sorcerer: Practices of Consciousness and Power. Bruce Kapferer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. xix -i- 367 pp., Illustrations, notes, references, Index
Public Faces, Private Voices: Community and Individuality In South India
Public Faces, Private Voices: Community and Individuality In South India. Mattison Mines. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. + 232 pp., figures, maps, notes, bibliography, index
From `interpretative communities' to `communities of improvisation
Concretely Imagining the Southern Digambar Jain Community, 1899-1920
In the pilgrimage season of 1899 a 'small but select' group of Jains met before the temple of the deity Bharamappa near Kolhapur to found the Southern Maharashtra Jain Sabha, thedakṣiṣ mahāraṣṬrajain sabhā.The intended constituency of the Sabha was the Digambar Jain population of the Southern Maratha Country of the Bombay Presidency, the area including Kolhapur State, Belgaum, and Sangli, with their rural hinterlands. The Sabha prospers still, wh…
Por qué los humanos tenemos culturas: Una aproximación a la antropología y la diversidad social
The Assembly of Listeners: Jains in Society
The Assembly of Listeners: Jains in Society
General/Theoretical Anthropology: The Work of Culture: Symbolic Transformation in Psychoanalysis and Anthropology. Gananath Obeyesekere
The Assembly of Listeners: Jains in Society
The Jains have exerted an influence on Indian Society and religion out of proportion with their relatively small numbers. The Assembly of Listeners: Jains in Society addresses the sociology of the Jains and discusses the notion of the 'community' based on religious affiliation in India. Topics covered include Jain ideals and identity; women in the Jains community; popular Jainism; Jain reform and Jain identity in the UK. This collection is an imp…
The Search for Society: Quest for a Biosocial Science and Morality
The Category of the person: Anthropology, Philosophy, History
"The concept that peope have of themselves as a 'person' is one of the most intimate notions that they hold. Yet the way in which the category of the person is conceived varies over time and space. In this volume, anthropologists, philosophers, and historians examine the notion of the person in different cultures, past and present. Taking as their starting point a lecture on the person as a category of the human mind, given by Marcel Mauss in 193…
Ontology Is Just Another Word for Culture: Motion Tabled at the 2008 Meeting of the Group for Debates in Anthropological Theory, University of Manchester
Anthropology as a Moral Science of Possibilities
In a world of continued and expanding empire, does sociocultural anthropology in itself offer grounds for moral and social criticism? One line in anthropological thought leads to cultural relativism and an awareness that a cloud of alternative possibilites surrounds any moral code. However, a second line, based in reflection on fieldwork and on the professional ethics arising with it, does suggest some basic moral aesthetic standards, including t…
Why Anthropologists Should Study Rhetoric
Brexit Referendum: First reactions from anthropology
Brexit Referendum: first reactions from anthropologyMy immediate reaction to the results of the British Referendum on leaving or remaining in the EU was to remember Alexei Yurchak's book, Everything was forever, until it was no more (Yurchak 2006).In the book, Yurchak describes the feeling of many people in Russia when the Soviet Union broke up: it came as a complete shock because they thought it would never happen; but once it had happened, it w…
Why Humans Have Cultures
Sociocultural anthropology and evolutionary biology have reached the point at which it is possible to give a coherent and synthetic account of the origins of human cultural vanability. From a sociocultural perspective what must be explained is not just the fact of varying cultures and societies, but also the human capacity to create, maintain and alter social forms over time. From a biological perspective we have to ask, what is the selective adv…
Is Anthropology Art or Science? [and Comments and Reply]
Reflections: The Anthropological Muse
From Inchoate Pronouns to Proper Nouns: A Theory Fragment with 9/11, Gertrude Stein, and an East German Ethnography
Despite the elaborate means human beings deploy to render the world predictable and transparent, we nevertheless continually confront situations which are uncertain and opaque. This is especially so in the modern world, in which supralocal institutions and information mediated from afar allow the actions of strangers beyond our face-to-face knowledge to affect us closely. One of the chief means we use to gain purchase in such situations is to doc…
Can a Species Be a Person: A Trope and Its Entanglements in the Anthropocene Era
The notion that an animal species is comparable with a human person is unusual but significant in North Atlantic societies. We analyze this trope to make a case for rhetoric culture theory as a powerful form of anthropological analysis. The "species is person" trope has been woven with other tropes to make moral and cosmological arguments in the present geosocial era of environmental crisis. The trope stands against two others in North Atlantic s…
Spectacles and Predicaments: Essays in Social Theory
Editorial preface I. C. Jarvie and J. Agassi Part I. Understanding Humanity: 1. The absolute in braces 2. Ethnomethodology: the re-enchantment industry or the Californian way of subjectivity 3. A Wittgensteinian philosophy of (or against) the Social sciences 4. Period piece 5. Chomsky 6. Notes towards a theory of ideology Part II. The Cognitive Predicament: 7. Options of belief 8. The pure enquirer 9. An ethic of cognition 10. Beyond truth and fa…
Someone, No One: An Essay on Individuality
The Modern Ascetics of Lanka and the Pattern of Change in Buddhism
Buddhism in Life: The Anthropological Study of Religion and the Sinhalese Practice of Buddhism
Anthropology as irony and philosophy, or the knots in simple ethnographic projects
In this essay on the idea of "anthropological knots" I lay out three closely related ideas. One is that the practice of ethnography may be regarded as being also the practice of philosophy, insofar as philosophy is the pursuit of knowledge about ourselves. The second is that this pursuit of ethnography/philosophy is in its nature ironical, which means roughly that it is woven, or knotted, in the encounter of differing viewpoints, just as Socrates…
Naked Ascetics in Southern Digambar Jainism
Seriousness, Irony, and the Mission of Hyperbole
Seriousness is achieved when a speaker effectively moves the audience according to his or her intentions. But seriousness is fragile and subject to countless vicissitudes, as illustrated in an encounter with the television evangelist Oral Roberts. I interrogate one of the means used to counter such vicissitudes-hyperbole. Hyperbole may include exaggeration and amplification of all kinds, and may be manifest in deeds as well as words. I first foll…
From lived experience to political representation: Rhetoric and landscape in the North York Moors
Approaches to landscape are characterized by an unresolved distinction between political representation on the one hand and phenomenology on the other. In this paper we address this distinction by demonstrating how those living in close quarters with landscape (farmers) translate their lived experience into political representation. Through the use of rhetoric culture theory we show how farmers use narrative and symbolism to stake their political…
Passions of Nation and Community in the Bahubali Affair
In early 1983 Digambar and Svetambar Jains forced into public prominence their struggle over the local Jain pilgrimage site of Bahubali hill in Kolhapur District in southern Maharashtra, in India. By the end of that year the majority Maratha community, Harijans, the local and State Congress Party, the police, the district administration, and the State and Union governments were also entangled in the conflict. These Byzantine and sometimes violent…
From `interpretative communities' to `communities of improvisation
On Ethnography without Tears
This article comprises five responses to a target article by Roberto Cardoso de Oliveira, "Sobre o pensamento selvagem," published in a previous issue of Current Anthropology. Cardoso de Oliveira's piece explored the concept of "savage thought" as presented by Claude Lévi-Strauss, arguing for a more nuanced understanding of indigenous thought systems and criticizing the binary opposition between "primitive" and "modern" thought. The respondents, …
The Category of the Person: Anthropology, Philosophy, History
A social form and its craft-y use
The paper considers the trope of ‘persons-in-parivaara’, persons in a retinue, as a rhetorical and social form in South Asia, using Digambar Jain examples, mostly from Maharashtra. As a social form, persons-in-parivaara evokes familiar themes, especially hierarchy in relationships, the vote bank, and Mattison Mines' notion of the ‘big man’. The paper shows how the persons-in-parivaara trope is used in a wide variety of media and genres, including…
The Feast of the Sorcerer: Practices of Consciousness and Power
The Feast of the Sorcerer: Practices of Consciousness and Power. Bruce Kapferer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. xix -i- 367 pp., Illustrations, notes, references, Index
Concretely Imagining the Southern Digambar Jain Community, 1899-1920
In the pilgrimage season of 1899 a 'small but select' group of Jains met before the temple of the deity Bharamappa near Kolhapur to found the Southern Maharashtra Jain Sabha, thedakṣiṣ mahāraṣṬrajain sabhā.The intended constituency of the Sabha was the Digambar Jain population of the Southern Maratha Country of the Bombay Presidency, the area including Kolhapur State, Belgaum, and Sangli, with their rural hinterlands. The Sabha prospers still, wh…
The Modern Ascetics of Lanka and the Pattern of Change in Buddhism
Someone, No One: An Essay on Individuality
Spectacles and Predicaments: Essays in Social Theory
Editorial preface I. C. Jarvie and J. Agassi Part I. Understanding Humanity: 1. The absolute in braces 2. Ethnomethodology: the re-enchantment industry or the Californian way of subjectivity 3. A Wittgensteinian philosophy of (or against) the Social sciences 4. Period piece 5. Chomsky 6. Notes towards a theory of ideology Part II. The Cognitive Predicament: 7. Options of belief 8. The pure enquirer 9. An ethic of cognition 10. Beyond truth and fa…
Buddhism in Life: The Anthropological Study of Religion and the Sinhalese Practice of Buddhism
The Category of the person: Anthropology, Philosophy, History
"The concept that peope have of themselves as a 'person' is one of the most intimate notions that they hold. Yet the way in which the category of the person is conceived varies over time and space. In this volume, anthropologists, philosophers, and historians examine the notion of the person in different cultures, past and present. Taking as their starting point a lecture on the person as a category of the human mind, given by Marcel Mauss in 193…
The Buddha
Indian Religion
Biographies of the Buddha
The Category of the Person: Anthropology, Philosophy, History
Buddhists without History
The Category of the Person: Anthropology, Philosophy, History
Reflections: The Anthropological Muse
Reconstructing Individualism: Autonomy, Individuality, and the Self in Western Thought. Thomas C. Heller , Morton Sosna , David E. Wellbery
Passions of Nation and Community in the Bahubali Affair
In early 1983 Digambar and Svetambar Jains forced into public prominence their struggle over the local Jain pilgrimage site of Bahubali hill in Kolhapur District in southern Maharashtra, in India. By the end of that year the majority Maratha community, Harijans, the local and State Congress Party, the police, the district administration, and the State and Union governments were also entangled in the conflict. These Byzantine and sometimes violent…
The Anthropologist as Author: Geertz's 'Works and Lives
Naked Ascetics in Southern Digambar Jainism
Is Anthropology Art or Science? [and Comments and Reply]
Why Humans Have Cultures
Sociocultural anthropology and evolutionary biology have reached the point at which it is possible to give a coherent and synthetic account of the origins of human cultural vanability. From a sociocultural perspective what must be explained is not just the fact of varying cultures and societies, but also the human capacity to create, maintain and alter social forms over time. From a biological perspective we have to ask, what is the selective adv…
On Ethnography without Tears
This article comprises five responses to a target article by Roberto Cardoso de Oliveira, "Sobre o pensamento selvagem," published in a previous issue of Current Anthropology. Cardoso de Oliveira's piece explored the concept of "savage thought" as presented by Claude Lévi-Strauss, arguing for a more nuanced understanding of indigenous thought systems and criticizing the binary opposition between "primitive" and "modern" thought. The respondents, …
The Assembly of Listeners: Jains in Society
The Jains have exerted an influence on Indian Society and religion out of proportion with their relatively small numbers. The Assembly of Listeners: Jains in Society addresses the sociology of the Jains and discusses the notion of the 'community' based on religious affiliation in India. Topics covered include Jain ideals and identity; women in the Jains community; popular Jainism; Jain reform and Jain identity in the UK. This collection is an imp…
The Search for Society: Quest for a Biosocial Science and Morality
The Assembly of Listeners: Jains in Society
The Assembly of Listeners: Jains in Society
General/Theoretical Anthropology: The Work of Culture: Symbolic Transformation in Psychoanalysis and Anthropology. Gananath Obeyesekere
Por qué los humanos tenemos culturas: Una aproximación a la antropología y la diversidad social
Sociology (30 works) · Philosophy (21 works) · Anthropology (16 works) · Philosophy (16 works) · History (14 works) · Computer Science (11 works) · Epistemology (11 works) · History (11 works) · Political science (11 works) · Art (10 works)